WhatsApp Now Has Live Location Sharing

Popular messaging platforms such as Facebook’s Messenger and Apple’s iMessage already offer a feature that allows their respective users to share location information to family or friends in real time. WhatsApp is now joining in on the party. The service is promising to soon make its new Live Location feature available to both its Android and iOS users.

It was back in February early this year when WhatsApp started testing the functionality. More than just a simple means for sharing a user’s location, the feature specifically allows a user to put a pin on the map to let others know his coordinates in real time, and at the same time, offer an option for letting other people continue to track the user for a specific period of time. The duration can range from 15 minutes to an hour and even 8 hours. Of course, the user can always decide to deactivate the real time location sharing, especially if he has reached his destination or when he no longer wants other people to know his exact whereabouts.

To start using WhatsApp’s new Live Location feature, a user needs only initiate a chat with the person or group that he would like to share his location information with. Then the user will simply select the new option labeled Share Live Location under Location when he taps the Attach button. After choosing how long the location sharing session will transpire, he can just hit Send to have his family or friends start tracking his real time location. When a group of people all share their location data to each other at the same time, they will all be displayed on the same map together with their real time location points. To know more about WhatsApp’s new Live Location feature, you can head on to the company’s official blog.

Introducing new features to its service should help generate some added momentum for WhatsApp, which has managed to breach the 1 billion mark in terms of the volume of active users on any given month more than a couple of months ago. Apart from reaching that mark, a quite impressive 76 percent of its monthly users also come back on a daily basis, sending over 55 billion text messages each day, plus 4.5 billion pictures, and about a billion video clips. Back in 2014 when it was acquired by social media giant Facebook, WhatsApp only had 450 million monthly users and 350 million daily users.